Environmental life cycle assessment of Barytes mineral pulverising industry: Case study from YSR Kadapa district, Andhra Pradesh

Mining based industries play an important role in improving country's economic growth and in generating employment. On the other hand mining activities and its auxiliary industries have the potential to cause environmental degradation. Life cycle assessment is one of the effective practices to achieve environmentally better management in mine based industries. Baryte mineral is richly available in YSR Kadapa district and is widely used in several industries. Thus Barytes mineral based industries are also plenty in this region. In these industries by using pulverisers, Barytes rock are grinded to prescribed mesh size end products and are transported to different parts of the country. A Baryte mineral pulversing factory was taken as a case study to study the product process by Life Cycle Approach method. The environmental assessment revealed the presence of air pollution especially due to less particles size, local noise pollution and open dumping of raw materials in the industry compound. The life cycle assessment indicates that, maintenance of equipment, time schedule for the effective procuring of raw materials and export of end products, safety measures to workers at the work place are few helpful measures to be taken. It also indicated that steps have not been taken to strategically improve the value addition to Baryte mineral by starting new industries that can use the Baryte mineral in this region itself.